Hours after several immigrants’ rights groups sued the Trump administration over the executive order he signed Monday to end birthright citizenship, 22 states and two cities in separate lawsuits joined forces to block its enactment.
Children who are born in the United States, regardless of their parents' immigration status, are legally entitled to U.S. citizenship, but President Donald Trump intends to end the law that has existed since 1868, when the Constitution’s 14th Amendment was ratified.
Trump’s executive order seeks to stop the State Department from issuing passports to babies born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents and would also instruct the Social Security Administration to no longer recognize them as U.S. citizens. The order is supposed to take effect within the next 30 days.
"Presidents are powerful, but he is not a king. He cannot rewrite the Constitution with a stroke of the pen," New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said of the complaint filed Tuesday in Federal District Court in Massachusetts.
The 22 states behind the two lawsuits all have Democratic attorneys general. They include California, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New York and Wisconsin. Washington, D.C., and San Francisco also have signed onto the lawsuit.
“Denying citizenship to U.S.-born children is not only unconstitutional — it’s also a reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values,” American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement about the lawsuit his group filed in partnership with other immigrants rights groups Monday night.
“Birthright citizenship is part of what makes the United States the strong and dynamic nation that it is," Romero added. "This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans.”
The White House said it's ready to face the states in court and called the lawsuits "nothing more than an extension of the Left's resistance."
"Radical Leftists can either choose to swim against the tide and reject the overwhelming will of the people, or they can get on board and work with President Trump," White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said.
The ACLU partnered with ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, Asian Law Caucus, State Democracy Defenders Fund and Legal Defense Fund to file the lawsuit on behalf of various groups whose members’ babies would be denied citizenship under the new executive order.
The suit alleges the Trump administration is flouting the Constitution’s dictates, congressional intent and longstanding Supreme Court precedent.
About 4.4 million children born in the U.S. and under the age of 18 were living with an undocumented immigrant parent in 2022, the Pew Research Center found; 1.4 million adults have undocumented parents.
Immigration and border issues were a major focus of the Trump presidential campaign. On Monday, hours after he was sworn in as president, Trump began to make good on his promises, signing executive orders declaring a national emergency at the southern border, reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy that requires asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico until their claims are processed, and ending a program that allows immigrants who entered the country illegally to remain in the country while their asylum cases are processed.
He also signed orders to renew construction of the southern border wall, suspend refugee resettlement and deploy the U.S. military to the border.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Note: This article was updated to include the White House's statement and information about a second lawsuit filed by states.